Teaching a "Social Studies without Guarantees": disrupting essentialism, ameliorating exclusions and planting the seeds

Social studies, burdened with the responsibility of elucidating the complexity of the cultural and social world of the student, inherits from its disciplines (history, geography, civics) a legacy of racialization and exclusion. For the past few years, I have worked through and from within this legacy to highlight some ways that the pedagogical imperatives held by the students can be used to reshape popular and taken-for-granted notions of who the “we” is in social studies inquiry. Specifically, I focus on Stanley’s (2014) exclusionary premise, emphasizing how the discipline and curriculum privileges specific notions of the national and provincial world of the students. Through this, I offer some insights into the ambivalences, resistances and acknowledgments of the students when confronted with unsettling social and historic understanding